Daniel Johnson, writing in the Weekly Standard from London, notes with sadness and alarm that the European elite have now admitted their failure to negotiate an end to the Iranian nuclear program. Not only that, but they let out of the diplomatic bag the dirty little secret that it’s always been about nuclear weapons.
So the Europeans know–in all likelihood they’ve always known–that the Iranians are building atomic bombs, and intend to use them against Israel. Against the Jews. Johnson says that if that happens, he’ll pack up and leave Europe, as well he might. I’m tempted to ask him why he needs to wait. British Jews now constitute the largest single group of immigrants to Israel, having seen the graffiti on the walls and in the newspapers of their finlandized country.
But Johnson, and others like him, are still kidding themselves about Europe. They think the appeasement of Islamic Fascism is primarily the result of the long campaign against Israel and Zionism. Here’s Johnson:
Why is the E.U., which makes so much of its humanitarian credentials, which sees itself as a creature of the Enlightenment, so seemingly indifferent? The answer, I fear, lies in the process that has deprived Israel of legitimacy and branded Zionism as a relic of European imperialism. That process has been grinding away for decades, but only now is it becoming plain that Europe’s vast superstructure of collective atonement for the Holocaust has been hollowed out from within. The calumny that Israel–the most liberal and egalitarian country in the Middle East–is an “apartheid state” has hardened into a conviction. The mud has stuck.
The campaign against Israel and the rising tide of antisemitism are two faces of the same medallion. Anybody who has studied the rise of National Socialism recognizes the symptoms, above all the dehumanization of the Jews, accompanied by the big lies about Jewish control of this and that, from the banks to the newspapers.
In retrospect, we can see that Europe set on this course at the turn of the twentieth century, then indulged their antisemitic fantasies until they were defeated in war. We then had a happy interlude, when antisemitism was so discredited by Hitler and rendered taboo as a result of defeat. That interlude is now over, and the Europeans are reverting to form. The surrender of citizens’ freedoms to the state is, after all, the essence of totalitarianism, and it is no less ominous today–wrapped in the sweet words of the nanny state–than it was in the 1930s, when it was accompanied by the racist chest-pounding of the leaders of the Third Reich.
Islamic antisemitism has been folded into this tradition, and European governments are all too happy to make room for their evil.
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